Republicans Plan To Gut IRS And Ethics Office To Protect Themselves And Their Donors

Republicans don't have a lot of legislative plans this year, but they've made two issues a top priority: Gutting the funding of agencies that could go after them and their donors. Their first order of business - should they ever get to that point - will be to cut funding for the IRS so that the agency won't have the resources to go after wealthy tax cheats; And the second order will be to do the same thing to the Office of Congressional Ethics which oversees investigations of House members. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

If Republicans ever actually get their act together, elect a speaker and finally get to inaugurate, uh, everybody into uh, Congress. Their plans for this coming year are actually pretty terrible because one of the first orders of business that Republicans have is their plan to gut the IRS funding that was, uh, increased with the Inflation Reduction Act. They made it very clear that they have their own legislation called the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which would strip all of that new funding away from the irs. And the reason they're doing that, of course, is to protect themselves, more importantly, to protect their donors because this extra money given to the IRS to hire enforcement agents, to hire lawyers, to hire more people to just go and do audits was directed at the wealthiest people in this country. You know, the tax cheats, the ones who find these loopholes that may or may not be legal, the folks who might be hiding millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts, the IRS has been ignoring them for years by design because republicans slash the funding so much, they couldn't afford to do audits on the super wealthy, which is why the lower class people making under $24,000 a year were more likely to be audited then those making more than a million dollars a year.

Cuz you can go through an audit of somebody making 24 grand a year in about an hour. It takes weeks to months to do one for somebody making more than a million dollars a year. That's the difference here. And in order to fix that discrepancy and of course recoup some of the money the IRS is losing in the Inflation Reduction Act, we increase the funding for the irs. We're gonna let you do the things that you need to do. And Republicans were at the time. And so one of their first orders of business is going to be to strip the IRS of that funding. However, silver lining here, they're probably not gonna be able to do that because it's never gonna pass in the Senate. And that brings us to the second order of business, right? And this one doesn't have to go through the Senate.

This is absolutely something that the Republican Party can do. They're going to, and we know this because they've announced it, um, change the rules and effectively kneecap the Office of Congressional Ethics. Which if you're not familiar with the Office of Congressional Ethics, it is in fact the body, the independent body that, uh, investigates members of Congress when they break the law. So, gee, I wonder why the Republicans don't want the law enforcement agency they have to answer to, to be able to function properly. Gee, that's a real head scratcher, isn't it? So what they want to do is they wanna put term limits on the people serving on that Office of Congressional Ethics Panel, uh, which would effectively mean that almost, well actually all but one of the Democrats on the panel would

Immediately be be ousted. So you'd have one Democrat, all the rest would be Republicans. And they would make it to where the agency could not hire any new staffers 30 days after a new Congress is sworn in. So if a new Congress were to be sworn in on January 3rd under these new rules, that Office of Congressional Ethics for the next two years couldn't hire anybody past February 3rd.